‘Black Yankees’ and the African Diaspora: Contemporary Perspectives on the Archaeology of African Americans in New England

DOCUMENT Citation Only Warren Perry. Gerald Sawyer. Janet Woodruff.

From the mid-18th to mid-19th century, Connecticut’s African-American community maintained an autonomous political and cultural structure headed by elected officials known as Black Governors. Their responsibilities included presiding over legal matters in the Black community, officiating at ceremonies, and maintaining an African-based social organization that was long ignored or misunderstood in European-focused histories. Despite their importance, the Black Governors are relatively unknown to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Landon. Teresa Bulger.

The African Meeting House in Boston became a center of the city’s free black community during the nineteenth century. Archaeological excavations at this site recovered material from the Meeting House backlot and a neighboring apartment building occupied by black tenants. These artifacts reveal strategies the community used to negotiate a place for themselves, create economic opportunities, and build community institutions. The Meeting House helped foster community success and became a powerful...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Croucher.

In understanding the archaeology of nineteenth century African American New Englanders, although some studies have targeted smaller, rural, sites, archaeologists and historians have tended to focus on communities in the largest New England cities, much less attention has been paid to smaller urban centers. However, for the first generations of emancipated New Englanders, smaller urban centers clearly exerted a significant draw. Middletown, Connecticut, was home to a growing community of African...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Wheeler.

I will present evidence from the Portsmouth African Burial Ground, as well as two other burial grounds where we found unmarked burials of persons of African descent. I will be speaking about the invisibility of certain groups of people, and how the marginalized have no one to maintain an institutional memory a generation or two down the line, which is how the burials became forgotten and unmarked in modern times. Portsmouth was not only the site of a segregated burial ground but the City to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Dujnic Bulger.

This paper will focus on rethinking how we consider family as part of the apparatus for combatting racism in 19th-century New England. This institution has been documented as a vital force for the survival of African American men and women who faced racial hostility throughout the United States, in both enslaved and free contexts. Inspired by black feminist theorists such as E.F. White and Gloria Joseph, this paper asks how same-sex relationships within families contributed to the strength of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Hutchins.

The years following emancipation in Massachusetts were pivotal for establishing how African Americans would participate in American society. African Americans in more rural areas faced a different set of personal and community struggles as they established their new identities as free Americans than did their peers in urban centers. This paper uses the historical documentation and archaeological remains of a small community in Plymouth, Massachusetts called Parting Ways to explore how the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Douyard.

Over the past 30 years, archaeologists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have struggled with several perplexing transactions in the deed chain of the W.E.B. Du Bois Homesite in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. There are several overlapping mortgages, and two apparent sales of the property. These documents seemingly contradict Du Bois’ accounts of the family’s continuous ownership of the property through the nineteenth century. Initially focused on these contradictions, I have shifted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Honora Sullivan-Chin.

The former homeplace of W.E.B. Du Bois in Great Barrington, Massachusetts is a National Historic Landmark administered by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This paper argues both the great value and inherent difficulty of studying and interpreting the archaeological heritage associated with the Burghardts, a landowning African American family who resided on the small parcel of land in western Massachusetts for almost two centuries. Furthermore, this paper seeks to provide an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elena Sesma.

In 1752, there were 25 Captive Africans living on the mile-long main street of Deerfield, a small village in present day Western Massachusetts. Slavery in Deerfield was by no means unusual, but in the heart of what many consider abolitionist territory, it seems shocking that English colonists bought and sold human beings in much the same way as their southern counterparts. Lucy Terry Prince, an African woman brought to America as a child, would become a legend in Deerfield Village, but despite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Martin.

In the 18th century and early 19th century, Andover, Massachusetts was home to a large African American community. However, we only know about a few of the inhabitants from the documentary record and archaeology. Only two African American homesites have been excavated- Cato Freeman and Lucy Foster (Black Lucy’s Garden). Selective acknowledgement and acceptance of a few African Americans by past and present communities have, at times, created a palimpsest towards the larger African American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Hutchins.

Cross-cultural interactions, among Native peoples as well as with Europeans, were a hallmark of the 16th century in the St. Lawrence Basin and adjacent drainages. This paper proposes some structural ways for examining these complex interactions and summarizes recent research pertaining to the Five Nations Iroquois and the Susquehannock. Particular emphasis is placed on how three classes of high-value material - marine shell, copper and red stone - can be used to probe these dynamics.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Casavant.

By examining 18th century South Kingstown, Rhode Island a bleak past is revealed about which few Rhode Islanders are aware. Amateur historians of the 19th century created the benevolent slave owner myth that still plagues Rhode Island’’s history The all too common stories of slave-ownership and slave maltreatment, as well as the archaeological remains of slavery, dispel the myth of Rhode Island as a safe-haven for all people during the early colonial years. The slave burial grounds on the...